This past week I was out of town with my wife’s family. We started talking about the current price of gold and what we thought about its future. So, as of this writing the price of gold sits around $1,652 per ounce. The highest price of gold quoted in US dollars occurred on March 8th, 2020, at the spot value of $2,074.60 per ounce. The lowest price quoted since the year 2000 was $437 in April 2001. That is about a 5-fold increase over a span of 20 years. Compare this performance to the S&P 500 in the same time period that returned about 326%, or just over a 3-fold increase. This reality is not really discussed on the finance news shows so it stands to reason that most investors are yet unaware of gold’s performance relative to stocks. In both scenarios, an investor would have made real money in either gold or stocks, so good for them. Let’s look at this another way. We are all witnessing the stock market struggle in 2022. At the beginning of this year, the S&P 500 was at 4,796, and as of this writing sits at 3,583. This drop represents a decline of about 25% in stocks since January. The price of gold at the beginning of this year was 1,896, and now sits at 1,650, representing a drop of about 13%. So, in this short study, gold has fared better than stocks in good times, as well as manages the inevitable pullbacks with more composure than its equity counterparts. I really do not need to be a tinfoil hat-wearing gold bug to see the value in this comparison. Like I said, both options have made people fortunes, and both stocks and gold have seen its share of people step up the plate and strike out. I am simply pointing out that gold has a value many investment scenarios. I can remember being a kid and seeing a small gold nugget in my dad’s rock collection that he had found panning out west. It weighed one or two grams and was about half the size of a pencil eraser. The little yellow rock caught my eye and held my attention better than the other rocks in dads rock
